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rgraham writes "From the article on Growler: 'Apple apparently believes that somebody else is behind Psystar, which might help to explain why a major law firm would take on what seems like a fly-by-night's case; also why Psystar has been so bold in continuing to sell its products. I knew this thing felt funny. As Alice in Wonderland might put it, "It gets interestinger and interestinger."'"

The post was modded off-topic because his post had nothing to do with the one he replied to.

He should have left a new comment instead of just automatically replying to the first highly-modded post. This is an abuse of the comment system to get his own comment to appear as high-up on the page as possible. I have mod points and I nearly modded him down myself, but I decided that explaining another modder's motives would be of greater help.

Sounds eerily reminiscent of the end of *every bloody Scooby Doo episode* where the baddie turns out to be a supposedly amiable minor character who in reality was bitter about some business dealing and trying to subvert his former partner.

Sad thing is, I almost instantly visualised this in animated form, and I didn't even like Scooby Doo that much!

Woz would have got away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky.... um, lawyers.

To be fair, sometimes they added a twist where there was an obviously disgruntled minor character AND an amicable minor character. The gang would then always incorrectly pursue the disgruntled character (who likes a grumpy gus anyway?) only to be shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU! when the disgruntled character proved instrumental in helping them catch the real culprit, the amicable one. Also, the disgruntled one was usually an under cover cop.

Apple probably hired pystar to create a weak but precedent setting test case they could smash.

More seriously,one can claim pystar is somehow a good value or something but this takes sheer cognative dissonance since it's impossibly far from the truth.

THat is to say, if you are buying an apple it's either for aethetics, ease of use for grandma or the volunteers at your non-profit, or compatibility, or the relatively low cost of tech support, set up, and training.

Now let's think about this. Does pystar meet any of those features? uh.... No. not one. they are loud, highly idiosyncratic, hard to keep updated, and a support nightmare, and many softwares and hardware devices won't work.

What's the market? cheapness? well certainly not at the low end. And at the high end--well it you want performance and dont care about comptibility then get a PC or a linux machine?

it's the OJ simpson defense: it does not fit.

But Apples implication that it's just a loss leader. Shove anything out the door so you can get a foot in the door makes a lot more sense.

THat is to say, if you are buying an apple it's either for aethetics, ease of use for grandma or the volunteers at your non-profit, or compatibility, or the relatively low cost of tech support, set up, and training.

Or because it's a Unix that runs Office and Photoshop, and supports wireless cards and GPUs without having to compile experimental kernel modules. (Yes, Linux is getting better. No, it's not there yet).

These are pretty serious allegations, but if it's true it wouldn't be the first time this has happend.

Hmmm... I wonder who would have the most to gain by undermining Apple. Could it possibly be a major corporation with an infamous [linux.com] track record of attacking [boycottnovell.com] its competition by proxy [channelregister.co.uk]?

I can't believe it would be them. Undermining EULAs hardly serves MS's interests. On this case, I would expect Apple and Microsoft to be allied and want the same outcome: that people agree (lawyer speak) to contracts that they never actually agreed (laymen speak) to.

Except in this case Apple would also claim contract claims under reseller violations. If Psystar is selling OS X to users, then technically they are a reseller. I'm pretty sure reseller agreements with Apple explicitly forbid Psystar from doing what they are doing. Unless they never signed such agreements. Then they are really hosed.

I seriously doubt Microsoft would be behind this scam.After reading the Groklaw article it sounds like the PCs are cheaply built with the options of Vista or Mac OSX.No finger pointing here, but China has become pretty adept at distributing reverse engineered and/or unlocked proprietary software.

My magic 8 ball says that Apple will successfully shut Psystar down eventually, only to re-emerge under a different name somewhere else in the future.

Well... The last time Mac OS had a licence for 3rd party use. Apple almost died from it. But also it can be a case to discredit the value of OS X. By opening the legal floodgates for having OS X compete on the same level that MS does gives MS and advantage as Windows tends to run better on Crappy (not necessarily slow but 3rd party rip off, or the product that do not have full functionality, eg. celerons ) hardware. And being that OS X doesn't have drivers for all the different platform options and the hardware makers already grudgingly make the drivers for Microsoft. Will make OS X run more unstable and flakier then Windows. Thus having Apple to loose a competitive advantage. However this is rather a complex marketing strategy. I would suspect the funding for the law suits were probably from companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo who just want to be able to ship OS X on their platforms so they can be Hip and Trendy too. Also not be stuck with Windows.

Y'know what? I'll do them one better and say that I am ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that someone is behind Psystar. You'd have to be an idiot to think that it was an entity that ran itself with no human intervention....

There are lots of PC companies that probably see Windows as a bit of a stumbling block to future sales. Dell has definitely said that it would like to sell machines with OS X. Should a court rule that Apple does not have the right to restrict OS X to its own hardware, that would open the floodgates to major manufacturers including Dell and HP to selling machines with OS X. It's not that hard to imagine one of those companies throwing money at a legally separate LLC/Inc that could bring the issue before a court. Should they [Psystar] loose, small loss. Should they win, those companies get a new product to sell in a market clamoring for Apple stuff.

ell has definitely said that it would like to sell machines with OS X. Should a court rule that Apple does not have the right to restrict OS X to its own hardware, that would open the floodgates to major manufacturers including Dell and HP to selling machines with OS X.

Sure, except you forget that Microsoft still has both hands on their balls right now. "Go ahead, sell OS X, but we won't give you OEM pricing then, you'll pay retail." Small companies like this one are the only ones that can pull this off because they don't have legions of angry shareholders and lawsuits to worry about, who would be rightfully pissed about a $100 increase in unit shipping price over an OS with a ~7% market share. Most won't even put Linux on their systems right now because of this, and Linux is free.

I do believe a little ruling a few years ago basically said no, Microsoft CANT do that. This is why Dell and HP have been able to sell Linux and Unix systems on top of their Microsoft OEM products.

No, Microsoft couldn't contractually force them to sell only Windows. That doesn't mean they can't just say "we're not giving you a discount anymore and we're not saying why." You think people that are fired for being gay are ever told that's why? Or people that are profiled by the police are told "We pulled you over because you're black"? There's always been ways around laws that say you can't do X for reason Y, because there's always reason Z, which is what everyone will claim was the reason, never Y.

Or maybe by someone who wants to save us from Apple's ridiculous and limiting EULA shrinkwrap nonsense.

>Should they win, those companies get a new product to sell in a market clamoring for Apple stuff.

That's true, but we also get a whole hell of a lot more consumer rights. Imagine being able to return software for a refund! Or running the software you paid for on anything you like. Or selling it. You know, the basic consumer rights we take for granted for everything except software.

Freedom to tinker and freedom to use is bigger than Apple. Much bigger.

MS Windows might be a stumbling block to future sales, but the OEMs are hardly doing anything about it. Decent laptops are not that cheap. A decent laptop, wth decent screen size, and decent memory, are $900. If one upgrades to the full Vista, then it is $1000. Sure one can get a cheap laptop, but I would hardly consider those vista ready. Sony of course has really nice, really expensive machines, better than Apple, if you don't care about battery life.

I have said this before. If MS windows OS was an issue, HP/Compaq have the experience to fix it. Dell, Sony, etc and the others only flog whatever they are told to flog, so they are pretty much stuck. the only reason any of them would want to sell Mac OS machines is to have an excuse to raise the price of the machines, like they have done with *nix machines.

What we saw in the previous Mac OS licensing experiment was that it was difficult to support all those clones. I know many people whose machines worked at first, but over time become incompatible with the OS. One part of the Apple strategy is that it will only support it tech that it wants to. We no longer have SCSI. We no longer have firewire on the low end machines. We have not seen a floppy on a Mac since 1999. The strategy of the PC OEM, which is to use whatever is cheapest component at the moment, and expect MS to support it, will not work with Apple. It only works because of most offices, computers are set up as a redundant array of cheap PCs, in which any machine is expected to fail, and redundancies are built in.

As soon as Apple can't restrict sales of Mac OS X to people who own Apple hardware, you know what you'll see? Apple will stop selling Mac OS X as a standalone product. The Apple faithful will just suck it up and buy new hardware.

I think Jobs has been hitting the egg nog a bit early this year. Wizard of Oz stuff and backroom deals is really more the providence of large corporations like the one he's a member of, not small businesses that are trying to find a niche to grow in. But at least the fanboys who go along with this line of thinking will look even more ridiculous than usual, which is a nice stocking stuffer for those of us that have gotten about as sick of these "Hi, I'm a PC" commercials as the whistling guy on about "natural male enhancement". Heh. "Mystery men out to ruin Jobs!" Really, sometimes the right hand (marketing) doesn't know what the left (legal) is doing with that company...

I think you're being a little naive (and the mods too) because this looks precisely like what happened with SCO, which was also a fairly small company that was trying to find (rediscover in their case) "a niche to grow in". To actually push their claims, they required large influxes of cash from a Microsoft shell corporation [linux-watch.com]. The way to answer this is to find who is financing Psystar and what conditions that financing is contingent on, e.g. in the case of Baystar, they actually threatened to sue SCO if SC

I think you're being a little naive (and the mods too) because this looks precisely like what happened with SCO

I'm not being naive, I'm trying to avoid slashdot turning into a forum where people have had their sense of humor surgically removed. Sacred cows make the best hamburgers, and Apple's fanbase is just too tempting of a target. nom nom nom.

But if we must be serious... Why sue Apple in a "dramatic way". Well, has anyone sued Apple in a boring and non-dramatic way recently? No. Apple's lawyers are legendary. Suitors routinely stage reenactments of Custer's last stand in the courtroom. Why would you try to stay

I haven't heard of this particular bruhaha or indeed, Psystar itself. TFA had few clues, it was apparently not its first blog about Psystar. So if anyone else is curious, I'll quote and link [wikipedia.org]

Psystar Corporation is an electronics company based in Miami, Florida which sells surveillance and communication equipment, and, most popularly, "Open Computers". These computers, first announced in April 2008, have the option to be pre-installed with Mac OS X Leopard, making them the first commercially-distributed hackintoshes.[1]

The end-user license agreement for Mac OS X forbids third-party installations of Leopard, and Psystar's Mac clone is in violation of that agreement.[2] However, Psystar believes Apple's prohibition against third-party installations might not hold up in court: "What if Honda said that, after you buy their car, you could only drive it on the roads they said you could?"[2] Psystar says it will continue to sell the Open system, adding "We're not breaking any laws."[2]

On July 3rd, 2008, Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar in the District Court of Northern California.[3] A case management conference was scheduled for October 22nd to plan out future proceedings of the trial.

On August 28th, 2008, Psystar Corporation responded to Apple's claims of copyright infringement, and also countersued Apple for anti-competitive practices, monopolistic behavior, and copyright misuse.[4][5] This countersuit was dismissed on November 18, 2008.[6]

Every time I see that "Honda/road" analogy I just want to grab the guy from Psystar who said it by the collar and shake him senseless for making such a craptacular analogy.

A more apt analogy might be "Imagine that Honda created some ECU programming that yields 15% better fuel efficiency. Instead of developing their own programming, Hyundai backwards-engineers the Honda ECU into their cars and buys the Honda ECU's on the aftermarket. Hyundai then advertises that they are running the Honda ECU efficiency program and Honda takes them to court."

It doesn't even have to be efficiency. Maybe the ECU makes the motor spew fire or something, but it makes a lot more sense than the ill-formed "Honda/Road" analogy.

It's not unusual to add unknown defendants to an action where all the tortfeasors are not known yet. This is simply a precautionary measure to ensure that Apple can bring a claim for damages against a party unknown to them should, through out the course of the proceedings, it is found that an unnamed defendant arises. By not adding an unknown party, would leave them in a situation where they would have to reinitiate the process from the start. As someone stated earlier it's simply a case of covering all bases.

Do you suppose it might be someone like Dell interested in testing the waters anonymously?

Not saying it's Dell or HP but I know they are in a bit of a pinch lately and I'd bet they believe they could out-compete Apple on margins and use their name-recognition to get the unwashed masses to switch. Imagine a Dell that could run Linux, Windows and OS X out of the box for $500.00. People would be switching left and right. Many Windows users could give a crap about aesthetics or build-quality so they'd not hesitate to go with Dell. Also, Pystar is selling servers, which is another area Dell is big in that could benefit from a broader selection. Apple would lose for sure unless they started selling OS X client for $500.00 a pop and server for $1000.00. But Dell would never risk "testing the waters" themselves, so when they see this little upstart come along, it's in their best interests to support them and help them succeed.

Support PyStar quietly in the background

if they gain traction "buy" Pystar

diversify their offerings so as not to miss the mac surge and have leverage with MS

6. Get sued to hell and gone by shareholders and the SEC who just found out they diverted money off the books.

Apple watches their SEC filings -- and they have to disclose where all their money goes as a publicly-traded company. If its discovered that Dell directly financed this company and didn't disclose it in their SEC filings, their next investment will be in Crisco.

which might help to explain why a major law firm would take on what seems like a fly-by-night's case

I have no interest in Psystar's products but that doesn't mean they're illegitimate. The biggest allegation I've heard on Slashdot is of them pirating OS X, but I've seen no proof that they've sold more copies than they've bought. I don't get the double standard of why Compaq's cloning of the PC was good while Psystar's cloning of the Mac is bad, other than Steve's reality distortion field.

You write that Apple "granted permission" to the maker of Franklin and then yanked it. That's simply not true [wikipedia.org]. Not even close.

In Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., the 3rd Circuit found that Franklin did so without any permission from Apple, but Franklin's logic was that you can't copyright something software isn't written down on paper. They copied ROMs that had no equivalent for sale on paper, ergo they didn't need to ask permission and Apple couldn't stop them. The circuit court ruled in favor of Franklin, because there was no legal precedent allowing software to be copyrighted, which is how it got bumped up to the circuit court, who ruled for Apple.

Obviously, Apple was right here. Without copyright for software, we'd have no GPL and the open source movement would still be stuck at the "freeware" stage.

The deal is that Compaq reversed engineered IBM's BIOS -- the only part of the design that was a trade secret. Everything else with the PC was very well documented and easily reproduced. The BIOS calls were already well documented. All Compaq needed to do was come up with a fully compatible BIOS without using IBM's code. Compaq came up with workalike BIOS using clean room techniques (or was it Phoenix technologies or some other shop -- I don't remember). I'm sure IBM fought tooth and nail, but they obviously weren't successful.

As for Apple vs. Psystar, it's quite different, the issue is that Psystar is violating Apple's software license agreement (that the OSX software will only be used on Apple-branded hardware). There are software checks in OSX to verify the hardware is Apple's, which means that Psystar would have to patch OSX to bypass those checks, and then distribute the modified code as their own OS.

Had Psystar somehow reverse engineered OSX with clean-room techniques to produce their own fully compatible workalike, this might be a very different case.

Also, copyright laws have changed quite a bit since 1981. I don't know if Compaq would have been able to legally clone the PC with today's laws.

IBM wanted to get a machine on store shelves quickly back in 1981, so they built an open system that was easily copied. The only proprietary thing about the IBM PC was the BIOS, which had to be clean-roomed. The Compaq BIOS was designed from scratch to mimic the genuine, copyrighted IBM BIOS in function, but other than

So, am I the only who thinks that the "someone else behind Psystar" is in fact Apple, fighting itself, schizophrenically?

Think about it. From one of the most locked down proprietary systems to come out of the 1980's, to a BSD based core espousing open source values a couple of decades later, basically this is Steve Jobs losing his mind and trying to break down his own core beliefs of hardware and gadget lock-in. And the only way this is possible is by going completely insane and fighting himself, while true believers and disbelievers alive gawk on.

Only problem with that is anyone who was important with Power Computing was bought by Apple. Power Computing was the only clone manufacturer who was completely bought by Apple as opposed to having their contract canceled like the other and for good reason, their computers unlike the other clones where excellent. Apple even hosted Power Computings tool and software utilities for years after they bought them out.

Power Computing was the only clone manufacturer who was completely bought by Apple as opposed to having their contract canceled like the other and for good reason, their computers unlike the other clones where excellent.

I don't know if I'd say they were "excellent". They were more powerful than comparably-priced Apples, though. I had to deal with about 150 Power Computing clones many years ago. While they were a good value, they were nowhere near as reliable as the Apples from the same timeframe. Not to

The Rothschild family, in order to destablize the US economy consipired with the Free Masons and the Illuminati to draw out Apple into a court case with Pystar to get anti-trust measures against Apple. The Skull and Bones and Pathagarians partnered to get the 'proper' judge and law firms involved because Steve Jobs refused to cowtow to the Grand Viceroy of the Pathagarians at a secret meeting in Prague.

Once the Osirians and Golden Dawn are placatied by Jobs with the seasonal sacrific they may interviene on behalf of Jobs but that depends if the New Dawn are not stopped by the rebel Crowley and the Keepers of the Flame. Since the New Dawn and Golden Dawn have been fighting since the 1950s after Crowley defected from the Golden Dawn!

If only the Sons of Liberty would put an end to this maddness with the help of the Neo-Templars! In the mean time we'll have to rely on government alien-hybrid psychics to try and mentally manipulate the court...

Apple also initially believed Psystar did not exist. Apple has a bit of a blind spot to the capabilities of a garage startup. That may seem surprising, since they were a garage startup. But then, it's been three decades of anti-competitive lawmaking and sanctification of the megacorp since then.

which might help to explain why a major law firm would take on what seems like a fly-by-night's case;

Yes. 'cuz god forbid a decent law firm would represent a pissant. If we can't rely on the legal system to prejudicially inhibit the growth of disruptive startups, we'll be throwing the doors open to unrestrained justice, treating small firms as though they have the same rights as our most honored entrenched divas.

also why Psystar has been so bold in continuing to sell its products.

Indeed - how dare they continue running a business which they believe to be both legal and profitable, despite the fact that they have so clearly upset The Steve?!?

I'm not saying that what Psystar is doing is necessarily in compliance with the law, but come on - this is a conspiracy theory. If Psystar was backed by some shadowy CABAL, their first address wouldn't have been a house (which lead to Apple's hypothesis that the whole company was a hoax).

Here's my question: What is going to happen when Psystar can't produce these back-room ne'er-do-wells? Will Apple press discovery and demand that Psystar prove a negative, that the conspiracy is not?

I think Microsoft would be willing to pay quite a lot of money for a legal precedent in favor of shrinkwrap EULAs on operating systems, especially if they can make Apple look like the bad guys each time they call on the precedent.

it's a baiting scam. first they sell a couple million psystars with OSX, then when justice says all of those copies must be wiped from the hardrives and returned to apple, owners will have to replace the OS with vista.

they annoy apple senselessly AND cash in a couple million sales. win-win for redmond

This is a very interesting part of computer history. Basically IBM used a whole lot of off-the-shelf stuff in the IBM PC (both the hardware and MSDOS). A few other companies realized that they could get in on the game, but they needed the BIOS which IBM would never give them.

IBM Compatible [wikipedia.org]: "IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to legally reverse engineer the BIOS through clean room design."

Why is it illegal to clone Apple Macintosh computers, but it was not illegal to clone the IBM PC? Why is Apple protected, but IBM was not? What's the distinction?

ANSWER:

The IBM PC was generic hardware with an operating system owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft didn't have any agreement that precluded them from working with other companies. OSX is an operating system owned by Apple which Apple is not willing to license to other companies.

You can "clone" a Mac all you want. Hell, at this point the Mac brand is more or less a clone of a PC anyway. Copy it and sell it all you want, just don't use any Apple branding on it. The kicker here is the software. OS X has a nice friendly EULA which stipulates that the software can only legally be run on Apple brand hardware. Despite the fact that you are buying a program to do with what you please, and it only takes a minor amount of circumventing to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware, it is illegal nonetheless. That is, if you believe EULAs are binding in the first place.

In a (very boiled-down) nutshell, IBM completely lost control of the platform. Same thing happened to Apple with the AppleII, but Apple learned and introduced some technical protections with their next product line -- the Macintosh. One thing they did was to include system software in ROM hardware, making it much harder to reverse-engineer.

Cloning a PC wouldn't be legal either if IBM hadn't screwed the pooch on getting the first product to market.

First of all, IBM massively underestimated the potential for growth of a microcomputer market. They held the idea that Big Iron was the only true definition of computing, and that things like the Apple ][ were hobbyist toys that would never amount to anything. They made the further mistake of assuming that if a market for 'toy' computers did start to become worthwhile, they'd have plenty of time to develop and ship their own product.

They were wrong in both cases.

When IBM finally decided to sell a PC, they were of the opinion that Apple was 6-12 months from getting a lock on the microcomputer market. If IBM couldn't put a product on the shelves by that time, there wouldn't be much point in trying.

So they tasked an engineer with the job of creating enough of a product to hold a space in the market while the designers put together something really good. Being a good engineer, he did a baseline critical path analysis, and learned that with all the forms, paperwork, and meetings, it would take something like 18 months to ship an empty box with "IBM PC" printed on it. Actually designing a computer to put in the box, shopping for parts suppliers, building an assembly plant, and all those other little details would just push the ship time farther out.

So, faced with the choice between losing a new market entirely or skirting around standard procedures, he proposed a radical plan: design a machine out of off-the-shelf parts, and contract third-party assembly shops to do the construction. That would allow IBM to put a product on the shelves within the 6-12 month deadline, but it would also create an enormous risk: anyone else who wanted to enter the market would be able to do exactly the same thing just as quickly, and just as easily. In fact, it would be even cheaper and easier for the me-too competitors, because they could skip the R&D phase and copy IBM's hardware design more or less verbatim (a process that came to be known as 'cloning').

So they built the whole thing around a chip which could only be sold by IBM: the BIOS.

The BIOS was a computer program burned into ROM. IBM held the copyright on the program, so nobody could legally duplicate that chip. But the BIOS was also tightly integrated with the hardware. Without it, the rest of the computer was just a box of random components. But those components were arranged in such a specific way that it would be hell to try to design a compatible product that wouldn't require IBM's BIOS to run. In one version of the fantasy, IBM wouldn't have to build computers at all, they'd just license BIOS chips to all the other companies that wanted to build hardware.

Then along came a company called Compaq, which reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS, and built a legally clean BIOS of their own from the reverse-engineered spec.

IBM sued, and lost. Compaq's legal team had done its homework on maintaining the 'virginity' of the coders who wrote the cloned BIOS.

At THAT point, IBM lost all control of the PC hardware market. And since their OS had also been outsourced to a little company up in Seattle, they didn't have any hooks left in the product.

So in answer to your question: it's legal to clone a PC because IBM was lumbering, stupid, arrogant, in a big hurry, and not thinking very clearly when it spent tons of money pushing a design into the market that could be ganked away from them almost overnight. In the process, they handed half of their market dominance to Microsoft (whose OS became the only thing that made the hardware a 'PC') and the other half to cloners like Compaq.

On the theme of folks piling on Apple lately, here's a new lawsuit against Apple, claiming Apple is trying to monopolize MP3s. And here's another, complaining about monopoly again and how Apple is such a meanie for not letting iTunes play Microsoft's DRM-encrusted format, Windows Media Audio. I've come to the conclusion, personally, that if you compete against Microsoft and start to win, you get sued by litigants who suddenly care about stuff only Microsoft can possibly care about. Speaking of monopolies. Complaining that iTunes on the iPod doesn't support Microsoft DRM doesn't pass my sniff test. I simply do not believe there is a customer in the world that would sue over that.

Just my opinion, folks. But I confess when I see a lawsuit complaining that DRM won't play, I start to wonder who might really care about that. I know I don't. I don't know anyone who cares about that, actually. That's what vendors fall in love with, not customers. Maybe in an alternative universe. And lookee here. The plaintiff is a lawyer. Well.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081019133549359

P.J. definitely has a point here. As such, Apple may have a point in their filing. The question is, how far abstracted from Psystar are the parties that Apple is really looking for?

Seriously it could be any one of a number of reasons. Lawyers are like dance hall hookers - you got the money they got the time so the fact a high price firm gets involved means little really.

The size of a company's bank account is usually proportional to their size. High-priced lawyers tend to want lots more money that a small company like Psystar likely has unless they have a puppetmaster.

Yes, but when talking PC MANUFACTURERS, Dell and HP have a serious competitor in Apple. Much of that attractiveness that Apple has compared to their offerings is in their operating system. In effect, Apple can manage to jack up the price and offer an extremely limited number of hardware options, but still pull in sales due to an advantage that Dell and HP simply don't have access to.

Eliminating that advantage would do a lot to drive some Apple customers to Dell and/or HP. At the same time, a lot of people with Windows systems that they don't want to replace might jump at the chance to replace it with a Mac(TM) by Dell or Mac(TM) by HP.

Either way, if this decision went in favor of Pystar, I don't see it being anything but good for the other major computer manufacturers.